Definitely. If you are present inside the VE you are designing you are
constrained in your actions by that environment and your model of it's
cause and effect relationships. Consequently anything you build or
design in there should hopefully be more "appropriate".
> I forget whose work it was (anyone?) but one approach to designing
> (graphical) virtual worlds was to use a pair of worlds: "heaven" and
> "earth". Earth is what you're making and object behaviour is "normal".
Is this what you are thinking of?:
@inproceedings{Fairchild:93,
author = {Kim M. Fairchild and Beng Hai Lee and Joel Loo and
Hern Ng and Luis Serra},
booktitle = {Proceedings of VRAIS'93, September 18-22, Seattle, Washington},
organization = {IEEE},
pages = {47-53},
title = {The Heaven and Earth Virtual Reality: Designing
Applications for Novice Users},
year = {1993}
}
I took a similar approach when designing and building my VEDA (virtual
environment dialogue architecture) system. The behaviour and dynamics
or objects can be represented within the environment and edited there
without leaving the environment. It uses a data flow approach to
behaviour description and borrows and extends the techniques of the
visual programming field. You gain several immediate benefits: no
loss of presence, no loss of application state, 3D tasks become easy
(gesture definition, object placement, path description), tight debug
loop, easily comprehendable structure and so on.
(At some point I will get round converting the slides about VEDA I
presented at VRAIS'96 into web pages.)
Anthony Steed